Milestone testing for opensuse 13.2

In the past, we have seen a series of milestone releases for testing the next version of opensuse. With 13.2, things appear to have changed. Here’s what Stephan Kulow (or “coolo”), the release manager recently wrote:

I don’t plan to release milestones till very late into the 13.2
development. They are replaced by daily snapshots

The entire thread is worth reading. Click “previous” or “next” to scroll through the thread.

The upshot of this is that we should not expect the usual series of milestones. My guess is that there will be one or two beta releases, followed by release candidates.

Snapshots

That does not mean that testing should stop. Rather, we should test based on daily snapshots. I have done that with the snapshot from May 28, and will describe that in a future post.

With the redesign, they are trying to have factory (considered as a distribution) somewhat stable, though with frequent change. In particular, the current plan is to require stability testing before changes are made to factory. So the suggestion is that people who want to test should install factory, update it periodically, and use that for testing.

Part of what I like to test, is the install procedure. So just running a factory install won’t do that. I’ll have to periodically download factory snapshots and test-install those.

The practice has been to make factory snapshots available at “download.opensuse.org/factory/iso/“, though there have mainly been live builds (KDE live, Gnome live, etc). I could not find a DVD installer there, though the mailing list thread suggests those will soon become available.

In the meantime, testing is done at the OpenQA site, and if you look hard enough you can find DVD iso files that can be downloaded from there.